


Night Visions. Finale.

by Aloice



Series: jayceofpiltover tumblr drabble collection [1]
Category: League of Legends
Genre: ALBTPTH!Universe Jayce, Altered Mental States, Gen, M/M, References to Depression, aka: the other long League fic I wrote that's only up on FF.net, mention of suicide, old League verse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-24
Updated: 2017-11-24
Packaged: 2019-02-06 03:34:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,052
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12808731
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aloice/pseuds/Aloice
Summary: AU verse Jayce, where he struggles with some... personal issues as well as an impending void invasion of the world.Written to Imagine Dragons' Nothing Left to Say, and arguably the drabble that really made me fall for Jayce in the first place.





	Night Visions. Finale.

**Author's Note:**

> (Originally posted on tumblr Jan 2015)

**Zero.**

> _There’s nothing left to say now_  
>  _There’s nothing left to say now_

He falls silent, a machine finally returning to rust in the dark, fuchsia rain dripping onto the streets along with crimson blood. A chuckle; a sob; then he spreads his ruined arms wide like a Demacian Angel on a crucifix, one eye the heart of a storm and the other burning with enraged electricity:

“Kill me! Why wouldn’t you kill me? Make me a martyr. Let me at least die the way I want, you FUCKING BASTARD.”

_You know me._

“I fucking hate you.”

_\- But don’t you hate everyone?_

“Fuck you,” Jayce spits, blood and phlegm and several cackles of static. His knee gives; his blue eye nearly pops out of their sockets, but the  _wind_  - the wind howls and bites and for a second he feels  _alive_  again, a frozen lonely man in Piltover who still stood a thousand fucking leagues above where he is now. “Fuck you. Fuck this. Fuck me.”

_\- Are you admitting it’s true?_

The fever. The lab. The cinnamon pies, the tea leaves, the tiny orange bombs. The pumpkin latte, the fucking pumpkin latte, growing cold in his hands as he walked that distance between Customs and Lab, crying alone in the dark. 

_I drew it in the dark; the blood swirled,_  
_The only sounds breaths from afar -_  
_That forbidden fruit, whispered love,_  
_The silent breaking of a lonely heart._

“Yes. Yes. Yes,” he whispers, as tears drain into the last cogs and gears in his valves, triggering degrees one and two heart blocks. Nobody is home. Nobody is ever home. He’s a tin can; robots don’t have feelings, and he’s not even Blitzcrank or Orianna, designed to amaze, designed to fucking  _function_.  _Prototype human; tainted, broken, missing. The peer reviewer, had she been an intelligent human being, would have thrown it out._  "There’s nothing left to say now.“

 

**One.**

> _Who knows how long_  
>  _I’ve been awake now?_

Cappuccino; mocha; latte; pumpkin spice, French vanilla, coffee from Urtistan and Shurima and slave villages west of Demacia. Three sugar cubes isn’t enough to counteract half an hour of salty tears. He flops around on bed and tries to dream of androids and electric sheep; he dreams instead of transistors and oscilloscopes, of filters that simply refuse to abide by their proper cutoff frequencies, and too many hours end up being spent half-awake half-hallucinating on the backseat of  _Radon_ , clutching the car’s soft cushions as if they are lifelines.

One morning, he ends up painting the interior coffee while holding a paper cup with his mouth.

Don’t all celebrities lead the fashion scene with their addictions?

 

**Two.**

> _The shadows on my wall don’t sleep_  
>  _They keep calling me, beckoning_

He swears he’s had Cait come over to examine his wall. Probably have asked Vi to punch it, too. He doesn’t ever turn towards that side of the lab in his sleep, because whenever he does, he gets nightmares - 

 _Oi, hammer nerd_ , Jinx had said the other day, eating his snacks in that carefree way of hers,  _are you sure your problem is a physical wall?_

He had asked her to blow up that wall completely. He had danced around the wound, drunk beers on top of coffee to it, thought he’d be free at last of demons both real and imaginary.

It didn’t work.

 

**Three.**

> _Who knows what’s right?_  
>  _The lines keep getting thinner_  
>  _My age has never made we wise_  
>  _But I keep pushing on and on and on and on…_

The Piltovian Council doesn’t know what the fuck they are talking about when it comes to higher level Laplace transforms.

Then again, neither does he.

"Just wing it,” he mutters on the fifteenth day to a whole table of fifty-year-olds with blank looks, shoving a protesting Heimerdinger under the table. They are never going to understand the Inventor’s explanations. It reminds him of the day he watched Ezreal leave in the rain, almost dancing away from the lab and the city as if the entirety of Piltover is a prison and he can’t wait to be free.

 _Bureaucracy is keeping me in shackles, for sure,_  he thinks mirthlessly as he gulps down a mouthful of instant ramen.  _But if I don’t write this grant application, I wouldn’t be able to help Caitlyn upgrade her stock of handcuffs._

**Four.**

> _Below my soul_  
>  _I feel an engine_  
>  _Collapsing as it sees the pain_  
>  _If I could only shut it out_

Engines are simple. He supposes that’s why science both irks and comforts him, because it’s so  _routine_ : mathematics  _cannot_  be wrong, thermodynamics  _has_  to work a certain way, there’s a  _definitely correct_  answer to what’s lying three miles directly underneath him. If he can’t make a metal joint move, he fucked up. Although science innovates, it’s also orthodox. When we have accepted that certain things are true, there’s no changing them.

_And just exactly what_

_Separates me_

_From my machines?_

He’s a product of the Academy, one of many children on an assembly line. Just because he had that one particular incident with Viktor doesn’t mean he’s deviating from the system. He’s scared of what’s outside the system, really; he had to get truly (utterly and completely and devastatingly) coffee drunk before he had the wits to go face Viktor, and even then, he had the conviction of helping all of humanity on his side - 

_Life isn’t heroic._

Guardians aren’t iconoclasts. They are  _lawful_.

And the laws of life are fucking dumb, most of the time.

“Sometimes I wish Viktor can come by again,” he croaks to the coffee-maker one night as the clock strikes three. “Drat. He’d probably be disappointed. Wow, some great Arch-Nemesis I am.”

_If only coffee is to humans what oil is to machinery. If only you can rewind designs that don’t work, have prototypes for the years of your life, transform your body between cannon and hammer._

In his dreams he walks up to Jinx again, finally answering her question. He strips away the cozy jacket, throws out the gears, and shows her his chest.  _Why do I hide it? It’s just a field full of empty._

“Zap that.”  _Maybe it could work as a defibrillator._

She frowns. “It wouldn’t do enough damage.”

He laughs. “Only if we don’t try.”

 

**Five.**

> _I’ve come too far_  
>  _To see the end now_  
>  _Even if my way is wrong_  
>  _I keep pushing on and on and on and on…_

He knows that he has friends.

Caitlyn had hugged him, Vi had bought him drinks, Ezreal had paid for his bills and the yordles had come to visit him on Snowdown - he has the best friends on the planet, doesn’t he? It’s almost a sin to be lonely after seeing all those smiling and concerned faces every day, isn’t it?

It’s a sign from the Gods when he loses even fucking  _Ezreal_  with his trains of thought, though.

How can you even fail at describing your life in metaphor to a lifelong friend who studies fucking  _archaeology_  for a living?

“Can I program something that can understand me? Clone something, even?” He complains to a long assembly line of scrap metal, handling each one like a firstborn child. “I can be as inconsiderate to all of you as I want. I can have all the unrealistic expectations I could fucking want, too. I can’t hurt your feelings. And if you don’t understand me, that’d be my own fault.”

_But didn’t your parents already repeat that statement to you over and over again enough times in your life, even as you lay sick on bed wishing you could die?_

Cait calls. He doesn’t answer.

The next day, he charts a path to avoid meeting Heimerdinger on the streets.

_God fucking dammit people I don’t want to make all of you sad._

**Six.**

> _If you could only save me_  
>  _I’m drowning in the waters of my soul_

Sometimes, after a drink: _I’m depressed because of love._

Other times, when he knows better:  _That’s just a fucking excuse._

He’s an ironclad knight in a labyrinth of dreams, a child that dreams persistently without waking:  _Maybe one of these days I could just throw away all of these thoughts, stay with the things I’m good at, and all my issues could go away…?_

_I want the sun too, you know._

_I want to be the man that so many people in the city think I am, the hero who has achieved so much and can achieve so, so much more._

_The Defender of Tomorrow - and don’t I defend it, which is why I’m still around? I still hope that each single day it would be slightly different, hope so much that I’ll get mad whenever someone tries to tell me that maybe tomorrow would be worse than today, however much of a hypocrite that ends up making me…?_

He tells Ezreal a lot: _if you ever find really, really good amnesia potions, please get me some._

Ezreal turns around with a puzzled face:  _why on earth would you want one?_

He laughs.  _To forget the one-night stands that don’t go well, obviously._

Ezreal snorts.  _Fucking bullshit._

_I think I have a visible obsession with saving people, and an invisible obsession with saving myself._

_One feels a lot easier than the other._

“Breathe!” Ezreal screams into his ears, and his eyes flutter open. His lungs feels as if it’s on fire.

 

**Negative One.**

> _I keep falling, I keep falling down_  
>  _I keep falling, I keep falling down_

“Jayce. Jayce, what did he do to you? Jayce, please, stay with me. We’ll get back to Piltover soon. Jayce, please, promise me.”

_I didn’t commit suicide. I really didn’t commit suicide. I managed to fight all the way until the end, fight the Void, fight with my friends, save my friends -_

“Stop fucking grinning at me, you fucking idiot. Please, just - just blink at me if you could hear me.”

_I’m an idiot of the first degree, but at least I don’t have any more things to say to my heart, not this time._

“Jayce, please.”

He’s falling apart at the seams, a human that can no longer hold himself together, the very image of him resembling one of a dismantled machine; he can no longer feel his wrists, or one of his legs, or most of his face, but he’s suddenly happy, happier than he has been in a very, very long time.

_I’m alive._

“I love you, Ezreal.”

A sob choked back down the younger man’s throat. “I love you too, Jayce.”

Freefall. It’s not like anything he remembers; he feels light, almost like the feather in the famous feather/ball experiment, and for once not afraid of the abyss below. He’s falling in a best friend’s arms, coming through - and how can it be anything other than safe?

_It’s time to fall back into bed, all the way at home._

“Au Revoir, Ezreal.”

 

**Seven.**

> _I’m giving up, giving up, giving up now_  
>  _I’m giving up, giving up, giving up now_

He gives up around noon.

The streets of Piltover are hazy; it’s a hot summer day, and the city is quite empty, the people seemingly content to live their lives indoors. He throws a mildly desperate glance at the City Square’s general direction before surrendering to his most primal urges: he’s fucking  _hungry_ , and a man’s got to eat.

The sign at the door had said fish soup. He doesn’t have a coin to his name. No matter. Something in his brain is vaguely telling him that he’ll get the bill paid somehow. The menu is long; he orders some fillets, and after a fleeting thought, a cappuccino.

He’s fairly sure that the two don’t go together, but with his memory as jumbled as it is, he has to trust his own instincts.

An exasperated caliber net hits his face right as he raises the cup of coffee to his lips. The drink spills everywhere. “Hey, excuse me, Lady - ”

“Jayce, you idiot,” a beautiful brown-haired policewoman cries, running into his arms as a fellow officer with startling pink hair runs into the doorway. “You fucking idiot.”

“What - ”

“You’re arrested, sunshine,” The pink-haired girl drawls, although there are tears at the edges of her eyes. “Time to go home, Jayce.”


End file.
